I'm glad Amazon took this stand. I respect most of the decisions they make as a company but this one seems especially prudent. Companies need to realize that if you release a broken product, you need to have repercussions at least for the people you have bamboozled into buying your shoddy product.

Andy Chalk:but it's not unreasonable of the company to cancel accounts belonging to people who refuse to pay.

Uh yes it is, it very much is. I haven't heard of a publisher coming to your house to confiscate all your games by them because you've failed a payment on one of their games and this pretty much constitutes that.

Falterfire:Not gonna lie, I'm kinda sad to see this happen to the SimCity franchise. I'm actually a fan of 'simpler' and 'dumbed down' sequels like XCOM:Enemy Unknown and Civilization V that make it easier to get into those ridiculously complex franchises that are difficult to understand for new players. I had kinda hoped the new SimCity would do that for its franchise, but instead this happens.

Ah well, back to Civ V I guess. Glad I didn't preorder.

I havent played oroginal Xcom and cant comment, but as for Civilization 5, where is the dumbing down? it is a upgrade if anything from Civ 4 and a complete change of gameplay. Civ 4 was a dumb down from previuos incarnations, that i woudl agree, but civ 5 isnt, unelss you compare civ 2 vs civ 5.its not ridiculously complex if you have brains though. two weeks ago a friend introduced me to a simuator that at first glance seems to be the most complex game. after 1 day i been tycooning there after working out some User interface specialities (the game was made in 1997, cant expect optimal UI). in fact i am yet to meet a game that i find complex enough. all games thatl ook promising end up "oh damn theres so many damn limitations"

Eric the Orange:Andy, you should know that truth cannot stop the internet hate machine.

True, but you have to look at the big picture. The fact is that EA abused its customers so much in the past, that they are now subjected to a much harder judgement than what another company would get, and can't get away with things others would be. People will use every opportunity to attack EA for any reason due to past experience with EA's service and products, not blind hate. That's how it is when you run a business and have many unsatisfied customers.

They earned that "Worst Company in America" award and now they pay for it. EA will have to do a lot to fix that damage now, and to do that, they'll have to be nicer than most companies.

I mean, when my friends trash on Origin I've been quick to point out my experience with it and that I don't have any issues with it that Steam don't have (minus a few missing features that is).

But credit cards and banks protect customers against stuff like this, i.e. being sold a defective product, and he was fully within his rights to do so. Punishing a customer for exercising--or threatening to exercise--their rights as a consumer is not acceptable business practice.

In my business we get a lot of fraudulent returns from customers who are returning a product for a full refund after clearly having used it fully. I just shrug and accept it as the cost of business. But then I'm also not selling something defective.

Looks like this needs to be UPDATED - Seems like Amazon is selling the game again, but it does have a note that:'Many customers are having issues connecting to the "SimCity" servers. EA is actively working to resolve these issues, but at this time we do not know when the issue will be fixed.'

mattaui:I might have had the occasional trouble with Amazon customer service, but by and large they always come through in the end, so I'm sure they got tired of having to deal with irate customers and realized that the source of the problem wasn't the customers, it was the product.

The fact that a company of EA's size and experience would continue to release such sub par product (Sim City being only the most recent example) is a clear indication that they've got next to no corporate leadership and a real breakdown in their internal organization. I just hope they don't have to trash any more franchises before they shape up.

EA is big, but it is not experienced, their PR practices (including all consumer related stuff) is amateurish at best.

They frequently don't know what to say, how to say it and are simply averse to adopt the most basic consumer friendly procedures. They are quite lucky to have some good game developers on their staff, because they certainly do almost everything they can to spoil the consumer experience with said games.

CrossLOPER:I personally like that kind of difficulty because it indicates that there might be a great deal of depth and the game might require skill and use of a brain.

No offense intended, but it's just there are classic lego people and there are duplo people, most of them being under the age of five. :)

There is a time and a place for that sort of complexity. It is not in your user interface. To use your analogy: I'd say Legos VS Duplo is more a game difficulty thing. The complexity I'm talking about is like Lego vs K'Nex. Sure K'Nex is more difficult to put together, but that doesn't mean the end result is any better.

In my opinion a game should be able to give you enough information in 15 minutes to beat an AI on the very easiest difficulty. From there it can be as hard as you'd like, but good game design means not putting all the complexity on the very surface.

What is the rush, exactly? I mean if you don't give a shit about the game and just want to blow through it in 15 minutes, what is the point? Just buy calladudy and play that if your brain is too fried to think at the end of the day.

And don't bullshit anyone about wide range difficulty levels. Games today, especially FPSs, are the easiest they have ever been, as a result of "making the game more accessible". There is virtually no threat of dying unless you have no thumbs or are blind or both. RTSs barely exist anymore. I'm looking back at the shallow RTSs release back in the 2007-2008 era and am reminiscing. That is pathetic. This is when World in Conflict came out. It was OK, but it was fairly shallow. The last good RTS I recall coming out was Supreme Commander in 2007.